Nokia Lumia 900

Review summary

Good points

• Great quality screen

• 4G-LTE availability

• Large battery life

• Regularly Updated Tiles

Bad points

• Small marketplace

• No MicroSD card slot

Our verdict

Windows and Nokia have upped the game with their new Lumia 900, adding some neat features to make it a real competitor in the smartphone battle. Even though Nokia doesn’t have the greatest appeal, this new edition adds a lot of promise to the range, and also makes Windows OS a more appealing service.

Full review

Design

If you were awaiting a radical redesign, you are going to be quite disappointed; the Lumia 900 is much like the 800, it has the same sleek industrial design, same clear AMOLED display and the Gorilla Glass that featured on the 800. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though, the 800 did look superb and a redesign would’ve destroyed the phones feel – especially given it is the second in the series.

The Lumia 900 design has been changed though, the size has gonefrom 3.7incheshas been pushed to a 4.2inch; there is now a neat 1-megapixel front-camera.

Even though Nokia has always made brutal industrial designs, this one has a sleek touch to it; also, the rectangle feel matches the Windows ‘Metro’ tile-design.

Reception

One of the key features that Nokia is trying to show is their reception and connectivity. With the added 4G-LTE capabilities, connectivity can be up to 25Mbps, which is incredibly fast. Even in 3G areas, the Lumia has very fast connection speeds on all major networks.

Phone reception is relatively good; the additional speaker on the phone gives better quality. Even with the extra speaker though, calling still seems very quiet and in loud areas you can sometimes be unheard. Additionally, the caller seems to hear a lot of unwanted noise from the background when it is loud, preventing clear conversation.

Processor

The Lumia 900 has a fancy Qualcomm 1.4GHz processor, which, while small compared to some of the other smartphones, works perfectly on the Lumia. There have been no problems with loading speeds on the phone and the work rate of the phone seems very good.

One notable problem is as the processor is only a single-core; it does have a tendency to slack behind when more than one tab is opened. It seems no matter how much you pack into the processor, to get the best results, you need more than one.

Operating system

With Android and iPhone’s operating systems becoming a bit stale, the Windows OS is a fresh new way to use a phone. The metro style tiles, which are going to be on the Windows 8 operating-system, are different from any other operating systems, and come with some appealing features.

Windows 7.5 has been used on the Lumia 900 and the 800, although it has undergone some changes to make the interface more fresh and usable.

The live tiles are a new feature to the Lumia; they allow the user to get instant updates from some of the applications on the phone, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterestand other apps.

Configuration between the Windows phone and Android apps isn’t exactly great, a number of people have reported that Android and i.OS apps have run slower or have lagged at times.

Camera

Even though an 8-megapixel camera does sound pretty neat, it doesn’t meet expectations. This is one feature of the Lumia that Nokia seems to not have grasped yet, even though it's a good size, it isn’t good quality.

The camera seems to not be able to produce good bright images; instead, you get dull images that are based around one colour. For example, if you take a picture of the sky and allow another focal to be added (a cat for instance) you will be left with a bluish hue on your cat. It is also widely too dark and misses most of your image, unless you are in a good well lit spot.

Battery

The Lumia has a non-removable 1830mAh battery, which is sealed inside the case. The projections made by Nokia state that the phone may have around 7-8 hours 3G talk time and up to 12 days standby time.

The phone will be able to pass through a day without losing all life, although if you have downloaded a large amount of apps, you may find it nods off before the day ends.

Storage

Another area the Nokia Lumia 900 doesn’t do very well in, even though 16GB of storage is far from bad, it isn’t on par with most smartphones. 16GB is enough to add around 75 music albums, which is far from little.

With the addition of new cloud storage devices, there is more room for storage and it can be easily sent to your computer. Of course, you’ll need to buy into extra storage if you want to use the cloudas your main storage device.

The other bad point about the Lumia 900 is it has no micro-SD card, meaning there is no way to add extra storage onto your phone, or have an easy way to move content from phone to computer.

Overall

The Lumia offers a lot of differentiation from any other model, it has an awesome look and feel to it, the hardware is some of the best on any phone and the Windows metro-tiles are a new operating system that makes a change. The problems about the Lumia seem to overshadow that though, even though they are only little mistakes.

I don’t know whether the Lumia 900 will be as high on the sales as the iPhone or the Samsung models, but is most certainly just as good in some areas.

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